This special supplement includes nine articles produced for the Open Government Partnership. OGP is a new effort to foster greater transparency and accountability, improve governance, and increase civic engagement worldwide.

This funder engagement was vital in giving
OGP instigators the external validation and confidence they needed to take the idea
full steam ahead. OGP was initiated by the
United States, Brazil, and six other international
governments, and early and flexible
philanthropic support helped ensure the
full participation of civil society—at a global
level—and its eventual representation in
OGP’s governance structure.

The myriad constellations and communities
of practice that make up the global
open government sector are fascinating
and the object of very little study. There are
well over a dozen distinct open-government
related communities of practice: freedomof-
information activists, open-data geeks,
fiscal-transparency zealots, service-delivery
monitors, financial-sector reform advocates,
and many more. (A good overview is
available on the Transparency and Accountability
Initiative website.) Many—though not all—of these communities of practice
have developed their own, somewhat siloed,
international standard-setting initiatives.
The net result is a veritable alphabet soup of
international initiatives: EITI, IATI, GIFT,
META, COST, ODC. All are dedicated to increasing
transparency, participation, and
accountability in their specific sub-sectors
(oil, gas, mining, budgets, medicine, construction,
open data).

OGP itself is not a standard-setting
body. It provides a forum for the standardsetters
to use as a policy hook for their
work. It has provided—in the words of John
Wonderlich, policy director of the Sunlight
Foundation—a “softball” to the civil society
community, to develop new open government
norms and standards and energize existing
ones. Civil society groups that seek to
build, or are on the verge of developing, international norms can do so and then work
with governments to include these norms in
their open government partnership action
plans. As of late 2012, OGP is contributing
to international standard setting on open
government in four ways.

First, governments are using OGP to
adhere to existing standards. For example,
the United States, Ukraine, and Colombia
became signatories to the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative (EITI) as part
of their OGP action plans. The United States
also became a signatory to the International
Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) as part
of its action plan. In fact, EITI has received
significant interest from OGP countries,
whose governments are signing up as well as
pledging progress on EITI implementation
as part of their country action plans.

OGP is energizing the global open government discussion, leading to the creation and development of new norms and standards.

Second, OGP is energizing the global open government discussion, leading to the
creation and development of new norms and
standards. The Global Initiative for Fiscal
Transparency (GIFT), which aims to develop
standards related to budget transparency
and participation of citizens in the budget
process, was directly inspired by OGP and
includes two prominent OGP government
members (Brazil and the Philippines) in its
founding stewards group. The Open Data
Charter (ODC) aims to provide a tool for civil
society to benchmark the many open data
commitments coming out of OGP as well as
for government reformers developing—at a
frenetic pace—new open data initiatives.

Third, OGP is beginning to influence
large-scale standard-setting bodies and
groups. The High Level Panel on the post-2015
development agenda (the rethink of the Millennium
Development Goals) is co-chaired
by three prominent OGP governments: Indonesia,
the United Kingdom, and Liberia. Civil
society and governments have spoken of an
Open Development Goals approach to “open
up” the UN-led process. Within the G8, G20,
and OECD, OGP governments are caucusing
and engaging with civil society in new ways to
push forward “the power of open.”

Last and fascinatingly, standards are being
developed by OGP from the bottom up in
ways that we cannot yet imagine. As 58 governments
make hundreds of commitments,
norms will bubble up to the surface. If 25
governments start instituting citizen budgets,
as the government of the Philippines
recently did, a new way for governments to
engage with citizens will emerge.

We are witnessing an incredibly exciting
array of international initiatives, and OGP is
energizing them and putting them into practice.
At its heart, OGP holds the promise of
bringing together these myriad communities
and building a truly global open government
movement. The philanthropic community’s
challenge now is to catalyze this innovation
while building a joined-up sector, and resist
the temptation to fund in silos.

Martin Tisné is director,
policy at Omidyar Network.
Previously, he was founding
director of the Transparency
and Accountability Initiative,
where he helped found the
Open Government Partnership.